"Jurassic Park inspired more people to go into biotech than any academic paper"
twitter.com
twitter.com
I was 7 when it came out, and when I saw that one scene with the 3D fly over of the clouds in the approaching storm, I was hooked. Hooked like “I MUST build this”
I started learning C, I downloaded NOAA weather satellite images from school and took them home on floppy disk. I started learning OpenGL (this was a few years later) over the course of many years I learned how to read a JPEG in C, how to denoise it, how to convert it to a height map, and how to animate a fly-over of it.
I think I saw “segmentation fault (core dumped)” about 50,000 times over the 8ish years it took me to build from ages 8-15 or so. It was funny because I had to learn the basics of trigonometry before they taught it to me in school, when it got to that I was like “ohhhhhhh i wish you had shown me this sooner this is really useful!!!” While the other kids were still complaining “when will we ever use this?!”
There’s a quote from the game civilisation that I love “instruct the children not to dream of toys or sweets, instruct them to dream of infrastructure” - I wish we had more scifi like Jurassic park that inspires our young <3
I was a kid back then but I'd seen otherworldly expensive SiliconGraphics workstations at PC fairs (my dad could only afford an XT clone), and seeing one in a movie was so cool.
And also gr_osview which was the resource monitor we saw running on one of Dennis Nerdrys monitors in one of the close-ups
> Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it does something much more interesting: tell stories about technology so compelling that people dedicate their lives to advancing the frontier.
How many fewer people would have gone into biotech had Jurassic Park never been made?
I have no idea how you compare those counter-factuals.
Had Watson and Crick not published that paper, someone else would have.
Had Jurassic Park not been made, what other movie might have inspired future biotech people?
Also, very low quality post, amounting to just a tweet, and an unsubstantiated one at that.
"Jurassic Park inspired more people to go into biotech than any academic paper. The Matrix inspired more people to go into computer science than any GitHub repo. The Martian inspired more people to go into aerospace engineering than any industry trend report.
Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it does something much more interesting: tell stories about technology so compelling that people dedicate their lives to advancing the frontier"
Wanting to recreate a sci-fi subplot irl can only get you so far, especially in an engineering field.
These movies are of course loved by all the nerds, me included; but I’d guess the causality is different than what the twitter poster suggests.
> tell stories about technology so compelling that people dedicate their lives to advancing the frontier
Not to mention that the point of a lot of these stories was to not advance the frontier in that particular direction.
Not personally. However, I can say that a lot of people got into trenchcoats, sunglasses, and lil slide out phones because of The Matrix.
Looking at at least one. It put me into the cringe habit of customizing my desktop the way I wanted it, and realising that Windows just would not do for customization, and thus began my lifelong Linux affliction.
Don't underestimate how foolishly 17 year olds fill out their college applications based on random crazy thoughts occuring to them that month.
the metaverse and the primer were great fodder for the imagination and seemed like they should be doable.